I was playing around with a USB stick (booting archlinux with qemu off of it and trying to perform an installation on the same stick at the same time -- brave, I know, but I was just messing around).
Now, after failing to boot and install at the same time, it seems I have sort of messed up my stick. What I think happened is that I used cfdisk to wipe everything on it and create one big partition, but formatting it then failed, so now there's a big partition with no filesystem.
Just to make it clear: I'm not worried for my stick, I know I can recover it at any point.
What I find intriguing is that after plugging the stick into my computer (using Ubuntu), there's no (terminal) way to find out what block device (/dev/sdx) it has associated. The only way I could determine that was with GParted:
But blkid shows the following:
/dev/sda1: UUID="12F695CFF695B387" LABEL="System Reserved" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sda2: UUID="A0BAA6EABAA6BC62" TYPE="ntfs"
/dev/sdb1: UUID="546aec8b-9ad6-4571-b07a-adba63e25820" TYPE="ext4"
/dev/sdb2: UUID="2a8b82d8-6c6e-4053-a446-bab970d93d7c" TYPE="swap"
/dev/sdb3: UUID="7cbede7d-c930-4e59-9d1b-01f2d79bd092" TYPE="ext4"
No trace of /dev/sdc. My question is: if I didn't have a graphical interface (to use GParted), how would I have known which block device is my stick?